Government support for the renewable sector in Scotland is costing more jobs than it creates, a report has claimed.

A study by consultants Verso Economics found there was a negative impact from the policy to promote the industry.

It said 3.7 jobs were lost for every one created in the UK as a whole and that political leaders needed to engage in "honest debate" about the issue. . . .

The report, called Worth the Candle? The economic impact of renewable energy policy in Scotland and the UK, said the industry in Scotland benefited from an annual transfer of about £330m from taxpayers and consumers elsewhere in the UK.

It said politicians needed to recognise the economic and environmental costs of support for the sector and focus more on the scientific and technical issues that arose.

Richard Marsh, research director of Verso Economics and co-author of the report, said: "There's a big emphasis in Scotland on the economic opportunity of investing in renewable energy.

"Whatever the environmental merits, we have shown that the case for green jobs just doesn't stack up."

Co-author Tom Miers added: "The Scottish renewables sector is very reliant on subsidies from the rest of the UK.

"Without this UK-wide framework, it would be very difficult to sustain the main policy tools used to promote this industry. . . ."

The Executive Summary of the report is here. The BBC, which has made an industry of global warming alarmism, actually reports this story in order to attack it, as noted at Biased BBC. Be that as it may, this report comports with reports from both Spain and Germany, showing that this insane push into green energy negatively impacts both jobs and the economy. Germany has recognized this and has resumed building coal fired power plants. Spain, upon whom Obama modeled his push into green energy, touting its employment benefits, is an economic basket case teetering on national bankruptcy. Nonetheless, Obama is pushing us down this same path at break-neck speed, between massive subsidies for green energy and his extra-constitutional assault on our energy infrastructure and domestic production of coal and oil. If he wins reelection in 2012, our nation will likely never recover, at least during our lifetime.

If asked to describe Teddy Kennedy, my response would be an out of control, intellectually dishonest leftie, womanizer, and boozer with no sense of personal responsibility. But it turns out, my description would not do the man justice. This from Powerline, summarizing FBI files on the "liberal lion" recently released pursuant to a FOIA request:

The most entertaining documents relate to a trip Kennedy took to Latin America in 1961. He visited a number of countries, accompanied by his "political counselor." In each country, Kennedy met with prominent Communists or other left-wing leaders. The U.S. Ambassador to Mexico was outraged that Kennedy wanted to bring such people to the embassy--this was the heart of the Cold War, after all--and he refused, telling Kennedy to arrange his own interviews somewhere else. A State Department official in Peru described Teddy as "pompous and a spoiled brat."

In Colombia, the first person Kennedy wanted to meet with was Lauchlin Currie, a Russian spy who served as a key aide to Franklin Roosevelt, then moved to Colombia and renounced his American citizenship.

By the time he got to Chile, Kennedy apparently was tired of political work, so he "made arrangements to 'rent' a brothel for an entire night" in Santiago.

Politically, between repeatedly reelecting Teddy and Barney Frank, both of whom have been utterly toxic to our politics and so destructive to our economy, I can't help but wonder if the rest of us ought to be asking Massachusetts to secede for the good of the nation.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

There is no greater impediment to quality education in America than public sector teachers' unions. Their interest is in money and power, not educating America's youth. These unions protect public education as a monopoly regardless of results. These unions protect the jobs of dues paying members irrespective of their competence. These unions constantly stump for more tax payer dollars to be funnelled through education for their own benefit. As noted repeatedly on this blog, nationally, we have more than doubled educational spending per pupil in real dollars over the past four decades while reading scores have remained stagnant and math and science scores have declined precipitously.

But what about Wisconsin, where education spending is 12th highest in the nation and the teachers' union is demanding that Gov. Walker's plan to limit collective bargaining be defeated "for the children?" This from CNS News:

Two-thirds of the eighth graders in Wisconsin public schools cannot read proficiently according to the U.S. Department of Education, despite the fact that Wisconsin spends more per pupil in its public schools than any other state in the Midwest.

In the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests administered by the U.S. Department of Education in 2009—the latest year available—only 32 percent of Wisconsin public-school eighth graders earned a “proficient” rating while another 2 percent earned an “advanced” rating. The other 66 percent of Wisconsin public-school eighth graders earned ratings below “proficient,” including 44 percent who earned a rating of “basic” and 22 percent who earned a rating of “below basic.”

The test also showed that the reading abilities of Wisconsin public-school eighth graders had not improved at all between 1998 and 2009 despite a significant inflation-adjusted increase in the amount of money Wisconsin public schools spent per pupil each year.

. . . [F]rom 1998 to 2008, Wisconsin public schools increased their per pupil spending by $4,245 in real terms yet did not add a single point to the reading scores of their eighth graders and still could lift only one-third of their eighth graders to at least a “proficient” level in reading. . . .

In fiscal 2008, the federal government provided $669.6 million in subsidies to the public schools in Wisconsin.

In a marketplace with competition, institutions showing results this poor would soon go bankrupt. Yet Wisconsin's teachers' union wants us to side with them "for the children." I hope there is a special place in hell reserved just for them.

What the unions are doing in Wisconsin has nothing whatsoever to do with benefits "for the children" and everything to do with money and power. What Obama and the DNC are doing in Wisconsin likewise has nothing to do with benefiting children and everything to do with preserving their most lucrative constituency - public sector union employees. George Will, surveying the events in Wisconsin today, inferred three lessons:

First, the Democratic Party is the party of government, not only because of its extravagant sense of government's competence and proper scope, but also because the party's base is government employees. Second, government employees have an increasingly adversarial relationship with the governed. Third, Obama's "move to the center" is fictitious.

In the video below, a member of CAIR tries to score points on Congressman Allen West regarding the peacefulness of Islam - and gets an earful from West, who happens to be very well schooled on the history and dogma of Islam. Enjoy this bit of red meat.

The fact that we have intellectually honest people in our government, such as Rep. West, and that our Constitution gives them the freedom to express that honesty, give some small measure of hope both for our future and the future direction of Islam. As I wrote here, unless people like Rep. West and people inside the religion of Islam are able to change the current trajectory of Islam, we are all on course for a bloody, existential collision.

In Europe, however, speaking with intellectual honesty about Islam is not merely repressed, it is repressed with the police power of the state. Were Rep. West to have given this same short soliloquy in, say, the Netherlands, he could have well found himself on the wrong side of that nation's interpretation of its 'hate speech' laws, much the same way Dutch politician Geert Wilders has.

Wilders, currently on trial for hate speech, addresses Islam and the European repression of free speech in a WSJ editorial today:

"The lights are going out all over Europe," British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey famously remarked on the eve of World War I. I am reminded of those words whenever I read about Europeans being dragged into court for so-called hate-speech crimes.

Recently, Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard, president of the International Free Press Society, had to stand trial in Copenhagen because he had criticized Islam. Mr. Hedegaard was acquitted, but only on the technicality that he had not known that his words, expressed in a private conversation, were being taped. Last week in Vienna, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, an Austrian human-rights activist, was fined €480 for calling the Islamic prophet Muhammad a pedophile because he had consummated his marriage to a nine-year old girl. Meanwhile, my own trial in Amsterdam is dragging on, consuming valuable time that I would rather spend in parliament representing my million-and-a-half voters.

How can all this be possible in supposedly liberal Europe? . . .

Early in 2008, a number of leftist and Islamic organizations took me to court, claiming that by expressing my views on Islam I had deliberately "insulted" and "incited hatred" against Muslims. I argued then, as I will again in my forthcoming book, that Islam is primarily a totalitarian ideology aiming for world domination.

Last October, my former colleague in the Dutch parliament, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, wrote in these pages of the way in which Islamic organizations abuse our freedoms in order to limit them. "There are," she wrote, "the efforts of countries in the Organization of the Islamic Conference to silence the European debate about Islam," citing their strategy "to pressure international organizations and the European Union to adopt resolutions to punish anyone who engages in 'hate speech' against religion. The bill used to prosecute Mr. Wilders is the national version of what OIC diplomats peddle at the U.N. and EU."

Indeed, in 2008 the EU approved its so-called "Council Framework Decision on combating Racism and Xenophobia," and the EU's 27 nations have since had to incorporate it into their national legislation. The decision orders that "racist or xenophobic behavior must constitute an offence in all Member States and be punishable by effective, proportionate and dissuasive penalties." It defines "racism and xenophobia" so broadly that every statement that an individual might perceive as insulting to a group to which he belongs becomes punishable by law.

The perverse result is that in Europe it is now all but impossible to have a debate about the nature of Islam, or about the effects of immigration of Islam's adherents. Take my own case, for example. My point is that Islam is not so much a religion as it is a totalitarian political ideology disguised as a religion. To avoid misunderstandings, I always emphasize that I am talking about Islam, not about Muslims. I make a clear distinction between the people and the ideology, between Muslims and Islam, recognizing that there are many moderate Muslims. But the political ideology of Islam is not moderate and has global ambitions; the Koran orders Muslims to establish the realm of Allah in this world, if necessary by force.

Stating my views on Islam has brought me to court on charges of "group insult" and incitement to racial hatred. I am being tried for voicing opinions that I—and my constituents—consider to be the truth. I am being tried for challenging the views that the ruling establishment wants to impose on us as the truth. . . .

I should be acquitted. My trial in Amsterdam is not about me, but about freedom of speech in Europe. As Dwight D. Eisenhower, Europe's liberator from Nazism, once warned, freedom "must be daily earned and refreshed—else like a flower cut from its life-giving roots, it will wither and die." Today in Europe, freedom is being neither earned nor refreshed.

George Washington once said, "If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter." When it comes to Islam, and particularly Islam in Europe, where Islamic minorities are not merely failing to integrate, but actively undermining traditional society, Washington's quote rings true indeed. The Islamist's are aided and abetted by left-wing governments wholly immersed in the toxic philosophy of multiculturalism. I thank God that our founders had the foresight to craft the First Amendment. While in America, we still might be able to influence the trajectory of Islam because of our rights to free speach, Europe is in a much more precarious state.

The following transcript is from an interview with former NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein on Saturday's edition of the Journal Editorial Report. Klein, who will never be described as right of anything, nonetheless is damning in his indictment of teachers' unions and their horrendous impact on the quality of education in America.

GIGOT: Well, perhaps nobody knows more about the failure of public education in this country and the challenges that teachers unions pose, than former New York City chancellor, Joel Klein. He now works for News Corp, the parent company of Fox News, and the Wall Street Journal. But for eight and a half years, he oversaw the largest school system in the United States.

I spoke with him recently and asked what lessons he took away from that tough assignment.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOEL KLEIN, FORMER NEW YORK CITY CHANCELLOR: I think the most important lesson is that despite the fact that public education is not really working for our country right now, the resistance to change is enormous. You would think that a system that was getting the outcomes, domestically and globally that we are getting, you would think it would be eager to think differently about the challenges, to innovate, to try to figure out how to be more effective, particularly for kids who grew up in poverty, but for all kids. And the resistance to change, the sort of constant status quo-ism in the system has really the most important lesson. And how we're going to change that is the key take away.

GIGOT: OK, first, the resistance, that's rooted in the bureaucracy in the current system and the unions and the politicians who support the unions.

KLEIN: You've got it. It works for those three groups.

GIGOT: Right.

KLEIN: It's good for the bureaucrats, good for the union and good for the politicians. Why do they want to change? They want more money. I get that.

GIGOT: Right. You hear that all the time, smaller classrooms, more money, and we've got to spend more on our children.

KLEIN: Let me give you the most troubling statistic. From 1983, when our nation announced it was at risk in education to 2010, in that time frame, we doubled in dollars our expenditure, and I think it's pretty clear we're more at risk today than we were in 1983. So money is not going to buy us out of this, Paul.

GIGOT: OK, so eight and a half years is a long time to spend knocking your head against the wall. Did you think that you succeeded in moving the schools in the right direction or do you think we need more radical change?

KLEIN: I think the answer is yes and yes.

(LAUGHTER)

I think we did succeed and I think we need more radical change. When we started, for a decade, the graduation rate was flat. For the eight and a half years, we took it up about 2.5 points or 20 points over that time frame. Having said that, it's also clear to me that way too many kids graduate high school who are not prepared for college. And far, too many kids don't graduate high school. In the 21st century, kids who don't graduated high school, what's their plan B.

GIGOT: One of your strategies for reform was to put charter schools in clusters, particularly in Harlem you did, and you had some success there, because then you get a kind of community that looks at it, all schools get lifted up by that kind of cluster strategy. But the critique of charters is that they never anywhere have gone up to scale. The kind of scale you need. Even though some individual schools are very successful, you need scale if you're going to reform the whole system. How do you respond to?

KLEIN: You're absolutely right. But I think Harlem is as close to scale, and in New Orleans now. Because Post-Katrina, they really created a new system. And in New Orleans, you have a real choice system. And Harlem today, 40 percent of the kids who start school go to charter schools. So that the concentration there and that's why you've got the enormous push back from the unions and others. The unions like a monopoly operated school system. It works well for the adults.

(LAUGHTER)

You have a guaranteed client base whether you're good, bad or what have you. On the other hand, in Harlem, nobody can take those kids for granted anymore.

GIGOT: Parents have choice.

(CROSSTALK)

GIGOT: Some of the Harlem school -- charter school operators are trying to run into the west side of Manhattan and they're running into enormous resistance, notwithstanding the positive results they got in Harlem.

KLEIN: Predictably so, Paul. People who have monopolies and a guaranteed client base don't like competition. The parents on the west side are demanding that this school be opened. They're lining up to get in it. There's probably going to be 100, 120 kids admitted. And you'll have 500, 600, 1,000, 1,200 in the first year. So parents are going to vote with their feet.

This story has to change because the parents are not going to tolerate the results. But that's not going to change without a lot of political pushback. And the powers that be in K to 12 education had this thing working just the way they like it -- more money each year, lower class sizes, more raises, lifetime job security, pensions for life. And why would you want to change that?

GIGOT: I've talked to a prominent Republican politician this week who said he may run for president -- this is on background. He said, look, we can't wait long enough for this system to change from within. It takes 30, 40 years, and with China competing against us, we can't wait. We've got to basically blow up the system with a multiplicity of options -- vouchers, home schooling, online education, new kinds of schools. Do you agree with that kind of radical idea?

KLEIN: I am crazy and I'm a Democrat.

(LAUGHTER)

So I think this is bipartisan. Well, no, look, Paul, we're looking at a time when our country is massively under-educating our children. And the 21st century won't be forgiving. It's not just China, but throughout the world, people understand that the demands on our work force are simply different. The manufacturing base is largely gone, obviously, the agricultural base is gone. In 1950, 60 percent of America's work force were high school graduates. Today, about six percent are high school graduates.

GIGOT: What's the technological answer? Because that's how we got around the post office, with Federal Express and e-mail. How can we do that in education?

KLEIN: Create competition, the kind of thing you and I we are talking about. People have to earn their client base. The kids that go to those schools, they will compete. That school on the west side, for all the noise you're hearing, watch when the parents line up around the block. And the ones that don't get in, they'll want a second, a third and a fourth. And once that happens, the school on the west side will have to compete and innovate. Technology can do a lot of things in school systems that adults now do. But because it's a monopoly operated school system, the adults don't want to change the way they do business. The incentive to innovate is not there. And as a result, we're using a 19th century classroom model in the 21st century. That's going to change.

GIGOT: All right, Joel Klein thanks for being here.

KLEIN: Thank you, Paul.

Remember all of that the next time you here some utterly scurrilous teachers union head claim that they need collective bargaining rights "for the children."

Monday, February 21, 2011

On this day in 1848, socialist philosopher Karl Marx and his collaborator, Friedrich Engels, first published their magnum opus, The Communist Manifesto. In it, Marx advocated for a complete reworking of society, starting with the formation of labor unions, building into socialism and then to communism. It marks the single most destructive and distorting philosophy ever put forth in history, bringing untold misery to the world and working destruction upon the fabric of Western civilization to this day. Its promise has always been that society can be perfected and utopia achieved. And while it has done some societal good in the West, the overarching reality has been economic misery and, in terms of communism, massive bloodshed.

I. Background, Philosophy & Goals

At the time Marx wrote his book, he was responding to very real problems in European society during the Industrial Revolution. Sweat shops, dangerous work places and slave wages were only a few of those problems. Moreover, European society tended to be very stratified, with many obstacles to moving between economic and social classes. Marx was also responding to Europe's colonialism as a similar evil of "oppression." And indeed, colonialism of the era, as practiced by all but the British, at least in retrospect, could be so characterized. His solutions, as expressed in The Communist Manifesto and other works, were well intentioned, but as explained below, his basic assumption about the regulation of economic markets was wildly false and his analytical framework of history was both superficial and grossly distorting.

All of that is to say that Marx's socialism is not an inherent evil. Some aspects or legacies of socialism that have found their way throughout Western society since 1848 are quite legitimate. As Bookworm Room states in a very informative post on the topic, protections for workers and a safe workplace are some of those legacies. The great weakening of the class system and the rise of the welfare state are others. And while the latter has gotten wildly out of hand, the proposition that society should provide a minimalist, temporary safety net is quite legitimate. Unfortunately, for what good Marx's socialism has done for society at large, the harm it has done has been exponentially greater.

Marx did not invent socialism, but he greatly stengthened its philosophical underpinnings, as well as describing and agitating for the final stage of socialism, communism. As I described it previously:

Steeped in the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and born in the crucible of the French Revolution, socialism was meant to wholly rework society. Socialist philosophers, most notably Karl Marx, rejected class and religion as the bases for societal structure and advocated remaking society under the watchful eye of a central government that would redistribute the nation's wealth and mandate social equality. At the center of the socialist revolution was the Marxian belief that all events could and should be analyzed in terms of the oppressor and the oppressed, the victim classes and the victimizing class - a simplistic and distorting theme that makes up such a large part of our political discourse today. It creates, in its myopic view, a world of demons and perpetual victims. As Marx wrote in the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Marx envisioned a multistep process to communism. The very first step, as he pointed out in The Communist Manifesto, was for workers to create unions:

. . . [T]he workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by Modern Industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle . . .

The Marxist conception of socialism is that of a specific historical phase that will displace capitalism and precede communism. The major characteristics of socialism (particularly as conceived by Marx and Engels after the Paris Commune of 1871) are that the proletariat [workers] will control the means of production through a workers' state erected by the workers in their interests. Economic activity would still be organised through the use of incentive systems and social classes would still exist, but to a lesser and diminishing extent than under capitalism.

For orthodox Marxists, socialism is the lower stage of communism based on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution" while upper stage communism is based on the principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need"; the upper stage becoming possible only after the socialist stage further develops economic efficiency and the automation of production has led to a superabundance of goods and services.

III. Application Outside Of The West

A. Economic Model

As an economic model, neither communism nor socialism has ever succeeded in comparison to capitalism. This is because the central assumption of the socialist model - that governments can be a more efficient regulator of economies than free markets - has been proven false beyond any iota of rational argument. Related thereto, communism and socialism have failed because they look upon the fiscal self interest motivating the capitalist class as the penultimate sin.

"Greed" is not a dirty word, despite what our Commander in Chief might say in his attacks on capitalism. When fiscal self interest has been championed and combined with free market competition, it has massively lifted the standard of living for all in its ambit, including the lowest economic classes. And it should be noted that, in a free market economy, being a member of the lowest economic class at any given point is, for the vast majority, a transitory state. But when the opportunity to pursue one's fiscal self interest has been denied to the populace at large, as happens under socialism and communism, history has shown the result to be misery.

Those nations that have embraced socialism, with the government owning the means of production, are - or were before their collapse - economic basket cases. The Soviet Union fell apart in the 90's as a result of economic collapse. Communist China was well on their way to following the Soviet Union until Deng Xiaoping become the leader of the country and replaced communist economics with free market economics, starting China's economy on the road to what has been decades of rapid expansion. Cuba, North Korea, and Burma maintain full blown socialist economic systems, and all three have some of the lowest standards of living in the world today. In South America, Chavez is still in the midst of moving Venezuela into socialism, and its standard of living is tanking with stagflation and food rationing.

Similarly, in the Middle East, socialism and its closely related variant, crony capitalism, abound. Neither have worked there. For example, Iran, where government clerics own - and get rich off of - the major industries, is an economic basket case. Egypt is another example of a state with dominant socialist economics - and indeed, economic conditions were the motivating factor behind the recent revolution.

B. Social/Political Model

As a political and social model, Marx's philosophy has been even more destructive than its economic model. Marx's utopian world required an all powerful central government to enforce the distribution of wealth, to perfect society, to enforce equality of outcome, and to motivate people to produce in the absence of a profit motive. Marxism further rejected Judeo-Christian morality, leaving the state as the unchecked final arbiter of what is right and wrong, and thus prioritized individual human life below political goals to benefit the "proletariat" and the state. The end result has been slaughter on a scale never before seen in history. Well over 100 million people were murdered by their own communist regimes in the 20th century.

In China, "official study materials published in 1948 [show that] Mao envisaged that "one-tenth of the peasants" (or about 50,000,000 [people]) "would have to be destroyed" to facilitate agrarian reform." In the end, between the agrarian reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, Mao actually exceeded that total by several million. The Soviet Union purged at least as many of its citizens, if not far more, from its inception through the end of Stalin's regime. China and the Soviet Union were not anamolies. Virtually every country that has seen the imposition of communism has also seen government sponsored mass murder on a wide, if not industrial scale. For example, in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered roughly 20% of its population. In North Korea, somewhere between 710,000 and 3,500,000 of the populace have been slaughtered by the Kim dynasty.

IV. Marxism In The West

A. Europe

Britain is a casebook study in the experimentation with Marx's socialist ethos, both economically through the 1980's and, in social policy, through today. In the aftermath of World War II, Britain embraced socialism, voting in 1945 to reject their war-time leader Winston Churchill, in favor of Labour's Clement Attlee. Attlees's first orders of business were the creation of the welfare state, the nationalization of major industry, the creation of nationalized medicine, and the divestiture of the empire. Tremendous power was placed in the hands of labor unions, and Britain suffered economically for decades. It took Margaret Thatcher to turn things around:

She entered 10 Downing Street determined to reverse what she perceived as a precipitous national decline. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation, particularly of the financial sector, flexible labour markets, and the sale or closure of state-owned companies and withdrawal of subsidies to others. . . She took a hard line against trade unions.

Perhaps most important in the turn from economic socialism, Thatcher significantly weakened the political power of Britain's labor unions, reforming them in a manner not too dissimilar to what we see occurring in Wisconsin today. Such was Britain's economic rebound under Thatcher that the Labour Party ultimately dispensed with the idea of promoting socialism as an economic model, withdrawing the infamous "Clause IV" of its plank calling for nationalization of industry and wide-scale redistribution of wealth. In addition, Labour has continued Thatcher's union policies.

Much of Europe is incrementally trying to follow Britain's lead. Decades of European experimentation with socialism and the welfare state have given Europe moribund economies with slow growth and high unemployment. But that is changing. In the words of the NYT, "socialism is collapsing in Europe."

And socialism is not merely collapsing economically in Europe, it is also collapsing as a driver of society. Multiculturalism is a natural outgrowth of Marx's deeply distorting view that all of society should be analyzed in terms of the "oppressed and oppressor," and that, within that rubric, Western societies, with a history of colonialism and imperialism, are uniquely sinful oppressors. It is a belief system wholly detached from historical reality.

Euorpean multiculturalism encourages minorities to define themselves by the culture of their nationality or by their religion. And because Marxism holds indigenous Western culture to be irredeemably sinful, multiculturalism requires that non-indigenous cultures be accepted non-judgmentally and, indeed, seems to hold them to be superior to indigenous culture. It deliberately balkanizes society and it is particularly insidious as regards to Islamic minorities in Europe. Yet today, it is widely being acknowledged across Europe that multiculturalism has failed utterly. So says French President Sarkozy, Britain's David Cameron, and Germany's Angela Merkel. Hopefully this rejection of multiculturalism is sufficiently timely to cure the toxin Marxian multiculturalism has released into European society.

B. U.S.

Even as Europe moves away from socialism, Obama is trying to drive the U.S. towards the failed European economic model. Obama has set us on the road to nationalizing one sixth of our economy with Obamacare. Our government is today the majority owner of GM and Chrysler. Obama nationalized the student loan industry, ostensibly for greater efficiency. Moreover, Obama is insinuating the government deeply into our economy with a tsunami of new regulations, particularly in the areas of the environment and finance. Then there was the recent power grab to regulate the internet. Obama is ideologically committed to punishing the rich through taxes and redistributing their wealth for the 'greater good' of society. And lastly, Obama is showing a penchant for crony capitalism, picking winners and losers in the marketplace. If that is not incremental economic socialism, then nothing is.

It is not just Obama that is infected with the Marxist philosophy - it pervades the entire left wing in the U.S. The left in America today is not a monolith, but rather a mosaic of pigeon holed permanent victim groups - a toxin directly derived from Marx's oppressed / oppressor analytical framework. It is the maintenance of these 'oppressed' permanent victim groups - be they minority groups, gays, women, or public sector employees - that is the raison d'etre of the modern Democrat party. And indeed, the central financial foundation of the Democrats is taxpayer money laundered through public sector unions, the essential building block of Marx's march toward a communist utopia. This is not to say that a majority of Democrats are agitating to establish full blown socialism in America today. But it is to say that to understand our modern left and their trajectory, the first step is to read Marx. Step two is to study history in order to understand what will happen to our nation if they are allowed to pull our nation along that trajectory.

V. The War On Religion

Central to Marx's goal to entirely remake society was to drive Judaism and Christianity from society. Western culture, morality, history and societal structures are inextricably intertwined with the Judeo-Christian religions. Indeed, one could say that, at least until the Enlightenment, the history of Christianity, and to a lesser extent Judaism, were one and the same as the history of Western civilization. Thus Marx became an implacable enemy of these religions and started a war on them that the left continues to this day:

The left has waged this war against Christianity and Judaism ever since. Karl Marx, socialism's greatest philosopher, famously wrote in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that religion is the "opium of the people" and that "[t]he abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness." The British socialist party wrote in their 1911 manifesto that "it is a profound truth that Socialism is the natural enemy of religion." In America, the socialist left has used activist Courts as an a means of removing all aspects of Christianity from the public square while in Britain, the Labour Party is demoting Christianity and deconstructing the Anglican Church. . . .

With the left's partial success in their war on Christianity has come an interesting phenomena - the search for something to replace Christianity among the newly secularized. It would seem that we humans are hard wired to look for what amounts to a religion to give ourselves a moral mooring and a greater purpose in life. Socialist governments recognized this. Indeed, the first socialists in France substituted government sponsored cult movements in place of the Catholic Church. In Communist countries, where raw police power was used - not wholly successfully - to crush Christianity and Judaism, socialism itself was raised to the level of a religion complete with a sainthood - the quasi-deification of communist leaders as part of a cult of personality. Catholics had the Shroud of Turin; Soviets had the mummy of Lenin.

All of this has existential ramifications for Western society. For the better part of two millennium, the Judeo-Christian ethic has provided a rock solid framework for morality at the heart of Western society - one that puts maximum value on each individual human life and one that provides moral clarity in such things as Christianity's Golden Rule and Judaism's "Great Commandment." Take that mooring away from the ancient expressions of our deity and all morality then becomes dependant on what any particular person or government defines as the greater good.

When governments and individuals can define by their whim what is moral or immoral, what is desirable and what is punishable, human life is almost inevitably devalued. Certainly Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, and Pol Pot, between them responsible for the murder of well over a hundred million people in the 20th century, held to socialist belief systems that devalued human life and elevated in its stead political ideology. Many in the green movement argue that man is a parasite on the world and call for strictly limiting his impact using authoritarian means - including population control, forced sterilization and other such methods. . .

The bottom line is, regardless whether one believes in Judaism or Christianity, we will pay a very heavy price indeed for jettisoning them as the bedrock of Western society. Yet that is precisely what the left has sought for over two centuries, promising in their stead a secular heaven on earth. Ironically, should they fully succeed, history teaches us that their promised earthly heaven will be far more likely to resemble biblical hell.

VI. Conclusion

The allure of Marx's socialist philosophy, despite its utter failure as an economic model and its evil, bloody history as a social and political model, is very much alive. People embrace its utopian ideals wholly irrepsective of historical reality. It is fair to say that, since Marx first published the Communist Manifesto, the clash between Marxist social and economic ethos on one hand and traditional Western freedoms and capitalism on the other has been a reoccurring and often predominant theme across all sectors of society and culture. And indeed, what we see happening in Wisconsin today, pitting democracy against labor unions, is simply one more event in the history of that conflict. Marx may be dead, but his ghost still very much haunts us today.

Cartoonist Phil Hands of the Wisconsin State Journal is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, yet he is onto the Wisconsin public sector unions and the Democratic Senators who don't want to show up for work. . . . One may hope that if the Democrats have lost Wisconsin's editorial cartoonists, they have lost Wisconsin.

1. Dice the onion and thinly slice the carrot. 2. Break the garlic into cloves. Peel it, then mince all the cloves. Fresh garlic is best, but if you don't want to spend the time, you can substitute a heaping tablespoon of store-bought minced garlic in step 5. 3. Cut the tops from the peppers and discard. Place the peppers in a food processer and dice them into small pieces.4. Place the onions and carrots in pot with oil and sautee on medium high for 8 to 10 mins.5. Add the garlic and saute for another two minutes.6. Add the chorizo sausage and mash it up into small pieces.7. Add the ground beef. break it apart and cook until browned.8. Add the tomato paste and stir well.9. Add the salt, oregano, cumin tomato sauce and Guinness. Stir well and bring to a boil.10. Reduce heat to med low. Add all remaining ingredients except the cheese. Mix well. 11. Simmer for an hour.

Serve in bowls topped with a generous helping of shredded cheese. Enjoy.

What you don't eat immediately, you can freeze. The easiest way is to put 1 and 1/2 cups of the chili into plastic bags to freeze individual portions. They last at least a month. They may well last longer, but they are always consumed in a month in my kitchen.

You can make this chili much hotter or milder by varying the peppers you use, as well as whether you include the seeds.

If you really don't like hot chili, you can bring down the heat by removing the seeds from the peppers, as they contain most of the capsaicin - the oil that provides the sense of "heat" in the peppers. You will still get the pepper taste that defines chili, but you just won't have all of the heat. You can also uses peppers with much lower capsaicin levels, such as Anaheim and Poblano peppers - see here. Whatever you do, though, don't try substituting chili powder for fresh chili peppers. That's like substituting shoe leather for steak.

If you think the above recipe is too mild, leave in all of the seeds and add in a few habenero peppers to the above recipe. These peppers are among the hottest in the world, so add with moderation. I find one or two habeneros leave my eyes watering. Three and the chili is inedible by most humans with normal taste buds.

Enjoy. And if you have any suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments section.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

What is going on in Wisconsin is the first battle in what is a much larger, existential war for the soul of our country. Such are the stakes that we see, this week, the Obama administration applauding the breakout of democracy in the Middle East, yet at the same time fighting tooth and nail to undermine democracy in Wisconsin. What it boils down to is this - who owns our government? Is it the voters in their exercise of democracy, or is it the unions as part of a permanent Democrat entitlement? Do the voters excise control of the economic future of their locales and states? Or is their vote trumped by the public sector unions and their Democrat Party constituency. That said, for the left, questions of democracy are irrelevant. For Obama, the DNC and the Democrat Party, this is about preserving their single most important cash cow.

The electorate in Wisconsin voted to give Republicans all the levers of power in the state by a substantial margin. And the Republicans in that state have proposed legislation that will:

- Ask government workers to pay half the cost of their pensions - still less than private employees pay for their pensions

- Ask government workers to pay 12% of their own health insurance premiums - the national average for the private sector is over 20%

- End collective bargaining for government unions for pensions and benefits. Allow bargaining only for raises that are less than inflation.

- End forced union dues, collected by the state. Union dues would become voluntary.

- Union members get to vote yearly on whether to keep their union

Those proposals have Obama and the left interfering in Wisconsin state politics to thwart this legislation. Across the U.S. today, it appears that our politics and democracy itself are deeply distorted by public sector unions. And if Obama, the DNC and the left have their way, public sector unions will trump the democratic process.

There was a time when public service was considered a noble but lower paid calling. While benefits in the public sector were always good, public servants historically could expect to trade some level of wages in exchange for job stability. No more. Today, public sector union workers earn more than their private sector counterparts, they have far more job stability, and their benefits and pensions far outshine the average in the private sector. Looking specifically at Wisconsin, for instance, the "average Milwaukee Public School teacher will be receiving $100,005 in compensation this year – $56,500 of that is in salary, and a whopping $43,505 is in benefits." Note that a teacher's salary only covers a little over 9 months of employment. When adjusted for that, "teachers are among some of the most highly compensated employees in the state." And as far as quality for the tax payer dollars spent, it is notable that, according to Juan Williams on Fox News Sunday today, the reading test scores for black children in Milwaukee are the lowest in the country.

The left may portray this as fighting for a decent living or "for the children." Both are pure bull. For Democrats, what is going on in Wisconsin is about money, power, and, in an existential sense, their national economic foundation. And that is why virtually the entire Democratic Party, from Obama through the DNC and numerous other organizations, have nationalized Wisconsin state politics this past week.

It is impossible to overestimate how important public sector unions are to the Democrats. Public sector unions give Democrats a near inexhaustible source of taxpayer dollars to use for their own purpose, and they have used that money to deeply distort politics in America.

It is no surprise that the most money spent in 2010 federal elections came from a single public sector union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and that it was spent in support of Democrats. Nor is it any surprise to find public sector unions spending the most money in state and local elections. For example, in California, "the California Teachers Association spent $211,849,298 on lobbying and political spending to get its way in California in 2009. Along with the CTA, the Calif. State Council of Service Employees and 13 other organizations spent a total of one billion dollars on political lobbying of the State House at Sacramento."

And lastly, it is no surprise to find the states with a history of democratic control and public sector unions over the past decades today have high tax rates, crushing deficits and massive looming unfunded pension liabilities. The economic basket cases of Illinois and California top the list, though New York, New Jersey and many others are not far behind.

This is how it works. Ms. Jane Doe gets a job as a teacher in, say, Wisconsin. The local Wisconcinites are forced to pay taxes, and those taxes go to pay Doe's salary and benefits and to put funds towards her retirement pension and healthcare benefits. Ms. Doe is automatically enrolled in the existing union, she is not given a choice. The government automatically deducts $750 to $1,000 of taxpayer funding annually from her pay and they send those tax dollars to Doe's public employee union. Neither Ms. Doe nor the taxpayers have a say in that, nor in how the union uses that money. And in fact, the union then takes the money and uses it to stump to get their favored candidates elected - something that they have done with remarkable success.

That newly elected politician then sits across from the union at the negotiating table when it comes time for union and government to negotiate new contracts. Absent from the table are the taxpayers. The politicians are motivated to placate the unions in all of their demands. This becomes particularly insidious in regards to promises regarding pension and retirement benefits that won't come due until long after the politician is gone from office.

That scenario has played out across the country thousands of times. It is why today public sector union employees are, as a group, thriving, in contrast to the average private sector worker. And it is why unfunded pension nightmares threaten the long term fiscal solvency of many of our states. The total of unfunded retirement liabilities now tops $1 trillion among all states. A very large portion of that comes from California, now estimated to be $500 billion.

On the flip side of this unholy alliance, public unions invariably advocate for more government spending and taxes, since that is where their interests lie. Unions in the private sector are limited in what they can ask for by the realities of the marketplace - the need for the business to profit or go bankrupt. Public sector unions face no such limitation on their demands. As we can see happening across the U.S., when states and localities are operating in the red, public sector unions simply agitate for higher taxes to be imposed on the populace. It does not matter what is good for the community, the county or the state - only what is good for the unions.

Public sector unions are a toxin in our society of recent vintage. Many who argue today that public sector workers have a fundamental right to organize into unions are either deeply ignorant of history or lying through their teeth. While all people in this country have a right to free association and to petition the government, none have a right to force others to join their association and then demand payments from our nations tax payers. Whether public sector workers have the right to organize in America is anything but a "fundamental right" that is sacrosanct and beyond the reach of voters to change. Indeed, as a NYC Judge wrote in 1943:

To tolerate or recognize any combination of civil service employees of the government as a labor organization or union is not only incompatible with the spirit of democracy, but inconsistent with every principle upon which our government is founded. Nothing is more dangerous to public welfare than to admit that hired servants of the State can dictate to the government the hours, the wages and conditions under which they will carry on essential services vital to the welfare, safety, and security of the citizen. To admit as true that government employees have power to halt or check the functions of government unless their demands are satisfied, is to transfer to them all legislative, executive and judicial power. Nothing would be more ridiculous.

This sentiment was hardly unique. No less a person than FDR refused to allow collective bargaining for the public sector on similar grounds and, indeed, it "was orthodoxy among Democrats through the '50s that unions didn't belong in government work." It required legislation to allow public sector unions to organize in our country. In the states, ironically, it was Wisconsin that led the way, becoming, in 1959, the first state to allow public sector workers to unionize. At the federal level, it was JFK who gave us the toxic legacy of public sector unions when, in 1962, he signed Executive Order 10988.

This is the defining issue of our era. Do we control our destiny through the democratic process? Or is the ballot box subject to being trumped by public sector unions? The Democrats want the latter, for the economic life blood of their party depends upon it. Our nation's return to economic and political health requires that they be defeated.

Do you think government employees should be represented by labor unions that bargain for higher pay, benefits and pensions ... or do you think government employees should not be represented by labor unions?

A full 64% of the respondents said "no."

That includes 42% of Democrats, and an overwhelming majority of Republicans. Only 49% of Democrats think public workers should be in unions at all.

That suggests that the public understands what is at issue with public sector unions. That is very bad news for the left, and suggests that this will be a major issue in 2012 if the left continues to make this a national cause celebre - which they most assuredly will do. (H/T The Coffee Shop)

[Sappho is] one of the great Greek lyrists and few known female poets of the ancient world . . . She was an aristocrat who married a prosperous merchant, and she had a daughter named Cleis. Her wealth afforded her with the opportunity to live her life as she chose, and she chose to spend it studying the arts on the isle of Lesbos.

In the seventh century BC, Lesbos was a cultural center. Sappho spent most her time on the island, though she also traveled widely throughout Greece. She was exiled for a time because of political activities in her family, and she spent this time in Sicily. By this time she was known as a poet, and the residents of Syracuse were so honored by her visit that they erected a statue to her.

Sappho was called a lyrist because, as was the custom of the time, she wrote her poems to be performed with the accompaniment of a lyre. Sappho composed her own music and refined the prevailing lyric meter to a point that it is now known as sapphic meter. She innovated lyric poetry both in technique and style, becoming part of a new wave of Greek lyrists who moved from writing poetry from the point of view of gods and muses to the personal vantage point of the individual. She was one of the first poets to write from the first person, describing love and loss as it affected her personally.

Her style was sensual and melodic; primarily songs of love, yearning, and reflection. Most commonly the target of her affections was female, often one of the many women sent to her for education in the arts. She nurtured these women, wrote poems of love and adoration to them, and when they eventually left the island to be married, she composed their wedding songs. That Sappho's poetry was not condemned in her time for its homoerotic content (though it was disparaged by scholars in later centuries) suggests that perhaps love between women was not persecuted then as it has been in more recent times. Especially in the last century, Sappho has become so synonymous with woman-love that two of the most popular words to describe female homosexuality--lesbian and sapphic have derived from her.

How well was Sappho honored in ancient times? Plato elevated her from the status of great lyric poet to one of the muses. Upon hearing one of her songs, Solon, an Athenian ruler, lawyer, and a poet himself, asked that he be taught the song "Because I want to learn it and die."

In more modern times, many poets have been inspired by her works. Michael Field, Pierre Louys, Renée Vivien, Marie-Madeleine, Amy Lowell, and H.D. all cited Sappho as a strong influence on their work.

Given the fame that her work has enjoyed, it is somewhat surprising to learn that only one of Sappho's poems is available in its entirety--all of the rest exist as fragments of her original work. At one time, there were perhaps nine complete volumes of her poetry, but over the centuries, from neglect, natural disasters, and possibly some censorship by close-minded scholars, her work was lost. Late in the 19th century, however, manuscripts dating back to the eighth century AD were discovered in the Nile Valley, and some of these manuscripts proved to contained Sappho's work. Excavations that followed in ancient Egyptian refuse heaps unearthed a quantity of papyruses from the first century BC to the 10th century AD. Here, strips of papyrus--some containing her poetry--were found in number. These strips had been used to wrap mummies, stuff sacred animals, and wrap coffins. The work to piece these together and identify them has continued into the twentieth century. . . .

Below is one of the snippets of Sappho's prose that has come down to us.

Please Come back to me, Gongyla, here tonight,You, my rose, with your Lydian lyre.There hovers forever around you delight:A beauty desired. Even your garment plunders my eyes.I am enchanted: I who onceComplained to the Cyprus-born goddess,Whom I now beseech Never to let this lose me graceBut rather bring you back to me:Amongst all mortal women the oneI most wish to see.

The fight over public sector unions is now fully nationalized. That is not surprising, given what is at stake. Public sector unions are the single most important part of the modern Democratic power base. Their political power is huge and they uniformly support Democrats. Moreover, their money is ultimately appropriated from all taxpayers through mandatory union dues taken from public worker salaries.______________________________________________

Government unions are simply a parasite on the U.S. economy. When President Obama came into office, he shielded government unions from transparency by ending their reporting requirements to the Department of Labor. As a result it is impossible for the American people to know for sure how much of their taxpayer revenue is being diverted into union coffers. But if you assume that each union member pays between $500 and $750 annually, taken involuntarily directly from their paychecks, that means the government union industry in Wisconsin is worth at least $100 million a year.

If government employees want to voluntarily form associations and lobby the government for higher pay, better benefits, and working conditions, that is their constitutional right. But they have no right to force all employees to join their organization and take money from their paychecks every week.

_____________________________________________

Pull the rug out from under public sector unions and the modern wing of the Democrat Party is doomed. Thus do we see Obama challenging Wisconsin's "assault on unions" and his organizing arm in the DNC going all out to organize protests, including bussing in union thugs from other states. But it is not just limited to Wisconsin. The DNC is repeating this throughout numerous states with new Republican majorities, including Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Missouri, New Hampshire, Maine, and Pennsylvania.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) issued the following statement in response to reports that ‘Organizing for America’ – President Obama’s political operation – is helping to incite protests against reform-minded governors across the country:

“The President of the United States has a unique opportunity and responsibility to lead this nation. President Obama has acknowledged the challenges we face, but – thus far – he has done nothing to offer solutions. Now, worse, his political organization is colluding with special-interest allies across the country to demagogue reform-minded governors who are making the tough choices that the President is avoiding.

“This is not the way to begin an ‘adult conversation' about solutions to the big challenges facing our country. Rather than inciting protests against those who speak honestly about the challenges we face, the President and his advisers should lead.

“When the American people watched the people of Greece take to the streets to protest cuts to unsustainable government programs, they worried it might foreshadow events in our nation’s distant future – but today, we see the same sort of protests on the streets of Madison, fueled by President Obama’s own political machine.

“Rather than trying to ‘win the future,’ the President’s political allies are trying, desperately, to cling to a failed past by fighting reforms our nation needs to liberate our economy from the shackles of debt and create a better future for our children and grandchildren. The President should make it clear to his friends that the people of Wisconsin, and states across America, can handle their own affairs without Washington special-interest money and meddling. . . .

This is hilarious. A union leader in Wisconsin is interviewed by CNN and seems to be able to hear quite well, until she is asked to opine on the fact that Wisconsin Senate Democrats have gone into hiding in order to thwart democracy in the state. Huh? You're breaking up?

I do hope every taxpayer in the U.S. is paying very close attention, not only to left-wing idiots like this one, but to the role of Obama and the DNC in fanning this assault on democracy.

I've blogged extensively on how and why public sector unions are both a political and fiscal toxin to our society and why they should once again be outlawed as they were in our country until approximately fifty years ago. It is outrageous now to hear some on the left claiming that the right of public union employees to organize is a "fundamental right" in our nation. That is pegging my B.S. meter. To make that claim requires a complete ignorance of history. Prof. Bainbridge throws a light on some of that history:

. . . The case for private sector unionism, however, does not extend to the public sector. As Daniel DiSalvo writes, leading labor and political figures long recognized that public sector unions were a bad idea:

Prior to the 1950s, as labor lawyer Ida Klaus remarked in 1965, "the subject of labor relations in public employment could not have meant less to more people, both in and out of government." To the extent that people thought about it, most politicians, labor leaders, economists, and judges opposed collective bargaining in the public sector. Even President Franklin Roosevelt, a friend of private-sector unionism, drew a line when it came to government workers: "Meticulous attention," the president insisted in 1937, "should be paid to the special relations and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government....The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service." The reason? F.D.R. believed that "[a] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable." Roosevelt was hardly alone in holding these views, even among the champions of organized labor. Indeed, the first president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, believed it was "impossible to bargain collectively with the government."

He further explains that:

In 1943, a New York Supreme Court judge held:

To tolerate or recognize any combination of civil service employees of the government as a labor organization or union is not only incompatible with the spirit of democracy, but inconsistent with every principle upon which our government is founded. Nothing is more dangerous to public welfare than to admit that hired servants of the State can dictate to the government the hours, the wages and conditions under which they will carry on essential services vital to the welfare, safety, and security of the citizen. To admit as true that government employees have power to halt or check the functions of government unless their demands are satisfied, is to transfer to them all legislative, executive and judicial power. Nothing would be more ridiculous.

The very nature of many public services — such as policing the streets and putting out fires — gives government a monopoly or near monopoly; striking public employees could therefore hold the public hostage. As long-time New York Times labor reporter A. H. Raskin wrote in 1968: "The community cannot tolerate the notion that it is defenseless at the hands of organized workers to whom it has entrusted responsibility for essential services." . . .

In sum, public sector unionism lacks the economic justifications for private sector unionism. It results in significant distortions of the political process, which have real adverse consequences for the taxpayers. What's happening in Wisconsin (as ably monitored by University of Wisconsin law professor/blogger Ann Althouse) thus is quite heartening. The efforts by the Governor and the republican legislative caucus to reform public sector collective bargaining rights is an essential step towards fiscal sanity and political democracy.